SAN FRANCISCO—At a Game Developers Conference event today, Sony revealed more plans for the company's previously announced Project Morpheus VR headset, which will be coming in the first half of 2016.

While no prices or bundling details were announced, the device's improved specs were outlined by Sony Worldwide Studios president Shu Yoshida. Someone in the audience let out an audible "wow" when Yoshida started by revealing Morpheus' 120 Hz refresh rate and key display update. The screen is now an OLED display at 1920 x RGB x 1080, which Yoshida said means low persistence and removing motion blur from the old LCD. The device's screen is 5.7-inches, which is large enough for a 100 degree field of view. And the new design includes nine LED trackers to provide 360 degree tracking, according to Sony.

"With these specs achieved, we're one step closer to making VR a reality for games," Yoshida said. He went on to say that with the device "near final tech," there's finally a set of standards for developers to target.

Sony is holding the event details close to its chest, but we wouldn't be shocked if the PlayStation maker is ready to give official name, pricing, and/or release date details at the event. A few big name first-party game announcements or third-party game announcements would also go a long way toward convincing skeptics that their PlayStation 4 needs a pair of LCD goggles attached. Given how quickly LCD display and head-tracking technology is advancing, we'd also expect that the headset might now have more impressive specs than what we saw a year ago.

We're expecting roughly an hour of announcements starting at 3pm Pacific time, followed by some hands-on time with whatever Sony has on hand. Whatever it is, you'll hear it here first.

The company that pioneered 3-D printed firearms wants to pay $15,000 for a carbon fiber 3-D printer so it can make guns.

In an e-mail to supporters sent Tuesday morning, Cody Wilson, the founder of Defense Distributed, said that he will pay the sum to anyone who can get him the printer. MarkForged, the company behind the Mark One carbon fiber printer, says on its website that its printed parts “are up to 20 times stiffer and 5 times stronger than similar parts 3-D printed using ABS plastic.” The product normally retails for $5,500.

The firm's offer comes a week after it lambasted FedEx and UPS for refusing to ship its computer numerical controlled mill.

Security experts have discovered a potentially catastrophic flaw that for more than a decade has made it possible for attackers to decrypt HTTPS-protected traffic passing between Android or Apple devices and hundreds of thousands or millions of websites, including AmericanExpress.com, Bloomberg.com, NSA.gov, and FBI.gov.

In recent days, a scan of more than 14 million websites that support the secure sockets layer or transport layer security protocols found that more than 36 percent of them were vulnerable to the decryption attacks. The exploit takes about seven hours to carry out and costs as little as $100 per site. The so-called FREAK attack—short for Factoring attack on RSA-EXPORT Keys—is possible when an end user with a vulnerable device—currently known to include Android smartphones, iPhones, and Macs running Apple's OS X operating system—connects to a vulnerable HTTPS-protected website. Vulnerable sites are those configured to use a weak cipher that many had presumed had been retired long ago. At the time this post was being prepared, most Windows and Linux end-user devices were not believed to be affected.

Attackers who are in a position to monitor traffic passing between vulnerable end users and servers can inject malicious packets into the flow that will cause the two parties to use a weak 512-bit encryption key while negotiating encrypted Web sessions. Attackers can then collect some of the resulting exchange and use cloud-based computing from Amazon or other services to factor the website's underlying private key. From that point on, attackers on a coffee-shop hotspot or other unsecured network can masquerade as the official website, a coup that allows them to read or even modify data as it passes between the site and the end user.

The US system for guiding airplanes is open to vulnerabilities from outside hackers, the Government Accountability Office said Monday. The weaknesses that threaten the Federal Aviation Administration's ability to ensure the safety of flights include the failure to patch known three-year-old security holes, the transmission and storage of unencrypted passwords, and the continued use of "end-of-life" key servers.

The GAO said that deficiencies in the system that monitors some 2,850 flights at a time has positioned the air traffic system into an "increased and unnecessary risk of unauthorized access, use or modification that could disrupt air traffic control operations." What's more, the report said the FAA "did not always ensure that sensitive data were encrypted when transmitted or stored." That information included stored passwords and "authentication data."

Newly uncovered court documents in a federal armed New Jersey bank robbery case that went to trial in late February 2015 reveal an unusual back-and-forth between authorities and judges—ultimately resulting in the FBI seeking and getting a warrant to use a stingray. The move illustrates a rare known instance where authorities met the probable cause hurdle need for a warrant in a stingray deployment.

Seemingly dissatisfied with this restriction, an FBI agent then took an unusual step—he swore in a new affidavit as part of a warrant application to a different judge for permission to deploy "mobile equipment." Such gear would enable the FBI "to monitor the dialing, routing, addressing, and signaling information of the Target Facility in order to determine its general location for a period of 30 days beginning within 14 days of the date of the warrant." The second judge, United States Magistrate Judge Mark Falk, signed off on the search warrant absent other limits.

Greetings, Arsians! We're here again to bring you the latest deals courtesy of our partners at TechBargains.

We have a bunch of things for you today—first up is a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro, a convertible with a Haswell Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, and an impressive 3200x1800 screen. Spend an extra $100 and you can get a Core i7 instead!

]]>http://arstechnica.com/staff/2015/03/dealmaster-grab-a-3200x1800-convertible-yoga-2-pro-ultrabook-for-799/feed/0FCC chair: New Internet service rules not even close to utility regulationhttp://arstechnica.com/business/2015/03/fcc-chair-new-internet-service-rules-not-even-close-to-utility-regulation/
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/03/fcc-chair-new-internet-service-rules-not-even-close-to-utility-regulation/#commentsTue, 03 Mar 2015 19:55:21 +0000https://arstechnica.com/?p=622399

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler today defended the FCC's new rules for Internet service providers, saying they are "about as far from the old-style monopoly regulation as you can get."

While cable companies and telecommunications providers have threatened lawsuits, claiming the "utility" rules will hurt consumers and impede investment, Wheeler talked about how lenient the regulations are in a public Q&A session at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Led by Wheeler, the FCC last week reclassified fixed and mobile broadband providers in the US as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, allowing the commission to enforce network neutrality rules and other standards.

This is the same statute that applies to the old telephone monopolies, but not all of the same rules will apply.

]]>http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/03/fcc-chair-new-internet-service-rules-not-even-close-to-utility-regulation/feed/0Black hole is the most massive discovered in the early Universehttp://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/black-hole-is-the-most-massive-discovered-in-the-early-universe/
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/black-hole-is-the-most-massive-discovered-in-the-early-universe/#commentsTue, 03 Mar 2015 19:35:18 +0000https://arstechnica.com/?p=620893

At the core of every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole (SMBH). These behemoths are many times the size of ordinary black holes. And unlike your garden-variety stellar-mass black hole, supermassive black holes didn’t form from a collapsing star; rather, they formed.... well, we actually don’t know how they formed. But we do know just how big they are. An ordinary black hole can have about five to several tens of times the mass of the Sun (solar masses), where our own galaxy’s SMBH has about four million solar masses.

While we don’t yet know the mechanism by which SMBHs form, the prevailing thought is that they formed (relatively) small, with “only” 100 to 100,000 solar masses. They would then have gained mass over time as they gobbled up matter, ultimately growing to become the giants we see today.

A new SMBH has now been discovered with about twelve billion solar masses. By itself, that’s not unprecedented; others have been discovered with roughly the same mass. What’s astounding about the new discovery is the extreme distance of the SMBH—about 12.8 billion light-years from Earth—and hence, how quickly after the Big Bang it formed.

A federal judge has stopped Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood from pushing ahead with his investigation of Google.

In a short order (PDF) published yesterday, US District Judge Henry Wingate said that he's satisfied that Google has met its burden for getting a preliminary injunction. That means Google won't have to respond, for now, to a wide-ranging subpoena that Hood sent to the search giant last year. Wingate didn't lay out his reasoning in the order, but he said that a more detailed opinion is forthcoming.

Hood's investigation came under fire last year after press reports revealed that it was encouraged, and partly funded, by the Motion Picture Association of America. MPAA lawyers even wrote drafts of subpoenas intended to be used by the AGs.

"There are now, depending on how confirmed you want a planet to be, up to over 1,000 confirmed planets," Stanford's Bruce Macintosh told an audience at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. That's in part because of the ease of the transit method of exoplanet detection, which watches for changes in light as the planets pass between their host star and us. "With a sufficient camera, you can do this with a tiny telescope," Macintosh said, pointing to the HATNet system of 11cm telescopes.

But the transit method also tells us next to nothing about the planet, simply its size relative to the star it's orbiting. Radial velocity measurements, which look at the planet's gravitational influence on its host star, can tell us the mass. Combined, the two can tell us the density, which can provide some hints as to what the planet's composition is.

That's very little information to go on if we're trying to assess things like planet formation models or habitability. To really understand a planet, we have to start looking at the composition of its atmosphere, and there are only a handful of planets we've been able to do that with. And all of them have relied on a technique called adaptive optics. These systems correct for the distortion of the atmosphere by using a mirror that can be deformed to compensate for it.

Florida lawmakers are considering legislation that would make it unlawful to run a website anonymously if it offers "commercial" recordings and videos. The aim of the bill is to close or disrupt websites that don't comply—all in the name of protecting intellectual property rights.

The bill, which landed on the state's House and Senate floors Tuesday, requires websites to display a "correct name, physical address, and telephone number or e-mail address" of the owner if they play a "substantial part in the electronic dissemination of commercial recordings or audiovisual works, directly or indirectly." The disclosure is required even if all the recordings or audiovisual works disseminated by the website are owned by the website owner.

On Sunday, former Boston Red Sox pitcher and game studio founder Curt Schilling enacted some online vigilante justice against Twitter users who had posted violent and sexual comments about his daughter—by doxing them.

Schilling's blog post was a follow-up to his tweet a week earlier about his daughter Gabby Schilling, whom he congratulated for just signing a letter of intent to play college softball at Salve Regina University. Acknowledging that he expected to receive chiding remarks about her on Twitter—particularly from Red Sox fans and detractors alike—he nevertheless expressed astonishment at the crude, graphic replies from two Twitter users in particular. Those users, @Nagels_Bagels and @primetime227, have since had their accounts deleted, but not before Schilling could take screencaps that captured their threats of using baseball bats as sexual devices, among other comments.

The former Red Sox hurler took it a step further, using publicly available information to attach identities to these two users. One was a DJ at a community college radio station and the other was the vice president of a fraternity. "Worse yet, no less than seven of the clowns who sent vile or worse tweets are athletes playing college sports," Schilling added. "I knew every name and school, sport and position, of every one of them in less than an hour. The ones that didn’t play sports were just as easy to locate."

At the Game Developers Conference this morning, Unity announced the immediate availability of the fifth numbered version of its popular game engine, which can compile games for 21 different platforms from a single code base. New to Unity 5 is support for Oculus Rift VR games.

Unity boasts of "massively enhanced graphics capabilities" in its engine, such as a physically based shader built around real-world materials, real-time global illumination using Geometrics Enlighten technology, and support for HDR reflections. A new editor gives Unity users the ability to mix audio and animate characters more easily from inside the engine, while support for PhysX 3.3 adds improvements to collision detection and multithreaded simulation, Unity says.

Unity 5's launch comes alongside the unveiling of Unity Cloud Build. The new online service can manage and synchronize code versions across multiple users and build new distributions for various platforms on the cloud for later delivery. Cloud Build also provides more detailed performance enhancement and audience analytics tools, as well as enhanced exception logging.

]]>http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/03/unity-5-game-engine-brings-enhanced-graphic-tools-new-cloud-services/feed/0Review: The new Moto E is the most phone you can get for $150http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/03/review-the-new-moto-e-is-the-most-phone-you-can-get-for-150/
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/03/review-the-new-moto-e-is-the-most-phone-you-can-get-for-150/#commentsTue, 03 Mar 2015 16:30:31 +0000https://arstechnica.com/?p=621143

Andrew Cunningham

The new Moto E with LTE.

7 more images in gallery

Motorola's low-end phone lineup is getting crowded, especially since last-generation models are still available for purchase months after being replaced. There's the old Moto G, the old Moto G with LTE, the old Moto E, the new Moto G, and now two different flavors of second-generation Moto E. Every single one of them is available for between $100 and $200.

No single low-end Motorola is definitively better than all the others, but the new $150 Moto E with LTE makes a strong case for itself. It's got more storage than the old one, surprisingly good specs, and a smallish 4.5-inch display that will appeal to people who think the 5-inch Moto G got too big.

On top of all those features, the new Moto E packs in the other things that reviewers and users tend to praise about the Moto phones: a relatively clean load of a modern version of Android, a basic but attractive design, and better build quality than you'd expect. Like other Motos before it, it strives to offer the basics without frills or unnecessary embellishment. While our review of the original Moto E was lukewarm, we like this new one quite a bit better.

SealsWithClubs.eu, which bills itself as the world’s largest Bitcoin-based poker site, is in the process of issuing withdrawals to all players, shutting down US operations, and setting up shop in the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda under a new name.

The relocation comes in the wake of a recent raid on the Las Vegas home of the site's chairman, Bryon Micon.

Apparently dissatisfied with the $12 million it had already raised, Pebble today added another watch to its second Kickstarter project. The Pebble Time Steel is an upscale version of the plastic Pebble Time that bumps the battery life from seven to 10 days, bonds the color e-paper display with the top glass to eliminate the air gap, and includes both leather and stainless steel straps. Otherwise, the Time Steel and the plastic Time share the same software and features.

The Pebble Time Steel comes in black, silver, and gold, and it's available to the first 10,000 Kickstarter backers for $250 (as of this writing, there are around 8,000 slots left). It starts shipping to backers in July and will cost $299 when it hits retail. Those who have already backed the plastic Pebble Time can increase their contribution to pay for a Pebble Steel without losing their place in the queue. If they want both watches, there's another, higher donation tier for that as well.

Perhaps more interesting is the announcement of Pebble smartstraps, a way for users to extend the hardware's capabilities beyond what's included in the body of the watch. Pebble says that these straps can add NFC, GPS, larger batteries, car door openers, and other features to either Pebble Time or Pebble Time Steel. Pebble won't be creating its own smartstraps at first, but it's already published some developer documentation to help third parties get started.

New experiments show that the asteroids that slammed into Earth and the Moon more than four billion years ago were vaporized into a mist of iron. The findings, published in Nature Geoscience, suggest that the iron mist thrown up by these high velocity impacts was fast enough to escape the Moon’s gravity, but stayed gravitationally stuck on the more massive Earth. And these results may help explain why the chemistry of the Earth and the Moon differ.

When and how Earth’s metallic core formed is uncertain. Clues come from known differences in the preferences of certain elements to end up in either the silicate mantle or the metal core. In a mixture of silicate rock and iron metal, some elements, such as gold and platinum, tend to prefer to associate with the metal, while others, such as hafnium, prefer the silicate.

As Earth’s iron-rich core formed, it “sucked” the metal-loving elements out of the planet’s rocky mantle. However, measurements of the silicate mantle by James Day have previously shown that there are more of them left near the surface of the Earth than would be expected. This has often been attributed to a late veneer of asteroids that delivered an extra dose of metal-loving elements to the rocky mantle.

BARCELONA—BlackBerry today announced a return to the all-touch smartphone market with the unveiling of the BlackBerry Leap.

After a lukewarm reception to the all-touch Z10, Z30, and Z3, the corporate smartphone pioneer retreated to more familiar territory with the BlackBerry Passport and BlackBerry Classic. Both included the physical keyboards that once made BlackBerry hardware an essential part of the corporate uniform.

With the Leap, BlackBerry is once again trying its hand at a modern, keyboard-less phone. The specs appear to place it in the mid-range: it has a 5-inch 720p screen, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage (expandable with microSD), and a dual core, 1.5GHz Snapdragon 400 processor. That's a lot of RAM for a mid-range phone, but having (and perhaps needing) lots of RAM is a common trait of BlackBerry 10 devices; even the emerging market-oriented Z3 has 1.5GB. The rear camera is an 8MP device supporting 1080p30 video; the front camera is a 2MP device supporting 720p video. It will support LTE and GSM networks.

If you knew absolutely nothing about the bitter public debates over certain scientific issues in the US, the “teach the controversy” bills that keep surfacing would probably sound reasonable and unremarkable. These state bills, which are mostly identical, encourage science teachers to discuss the scientific strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories. Duh, right?

But why are these bills mainly focused on protecting said science teachers from being shut down by their superiors? Why would that happen?

To understand, you need to see that this is just the latest in a very long line of attempts to undermine the teaching of certain scientific topics that the legislators don’t like, especially evolution and climate change. The aim of these bills is to provide cover for teachers who want to teach their students that evolution isn’t a scientific fact and that creationism (possibly stealthed within the supposedly non-sectarian label of “intelligent design”) is a viable scientific alternative.

Just weeks after being convicted under a California revenge porn criminal law, revenge porn mogul Kevin Bollaert has been ordered to pay $450,000 in a default judgment. Bollaert was involved in a lawsuit brought by a 14-year-old girl, and he largely faced civil counts of child pornography.

Bollaert’s colleague, Eric Chanson, also ran the ugotposted.com revenge porn website. Chanson was commanded to pay the same amount in a judicial order handed down late last month by a federal judge in San Diego, California.

The case against Bollaert was filed on the girl’s behalf by Marc Randazza, a well-known First Amendment lawyer based in Nevada. Randazza previously won a similar default judgment issued by a federal district court judge in Ohio. In that case, a judge ordered Bollaert and Chanson to pay a woman $385,000 for posting sexually explicit images of her on their website. Chanson also partially paid a $330,473.75 default judgment rendered against him in Nevada, which was enough to satisfy his debt, according to a 2014 court document filed by Randazza.

The Khronos Group announced today Vulkan, its next generation API for high performance 3D graphics and GPU-based computation.

Vulkan, previously known as Next Generation OpenGL or just GLnext, is designed to be a low-overhead API that facilitates multithreaded 3D development, enabling different threads to simultaneously prepare batches of commands to send to the GPU. It gives developers greater control of generating commands, putting tasks such as memory and thread management in their hands rather than relying on video drivers to handle these responsibilities. In so doing, it greatly reduces the amount of work that the driver must perform.

The new API was created to make it a better fit for modern hardware: GPUs are complex, highly programmable devices, and CPUs have abundant cores and multithreading support.

BARCELONA, Spain—Until today, Microsoft hasn't said a whole lot about development on Windows 10. We know "universal apps" that can run substantially unaltered on phones, tablets, desktop PCs, and even the Xbox—and maybe one day, the HoloLens—are core to Microsoft's Windows 10 vision. We know that these universal apps will build on the ground work laid by Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1. But beyond that, the company has kept very quiet about the developer story.

The big message is still "Wait for the Build conference in April," but today at MWC the company started to open up about app development on Windows 10, announcing one new feature that might help with the troublesome app gap.

Windows 10 will let developers publish Web apps through the store. These will be true Web apps, run remotely from a developer's existing Web infrastructure without any modifications. Windows 10 will still support HTML and JavaScript development, and it will still support Cordova/PhoneGap style development where Web apps are packaged and deployed locally. This will be a third option.

On Monday, Open Whisper Systems announced the release of Signal 2.0, the second version of its app for iOS. What makes this latest release special is that it allows users to send end-to-end encrypted messages, for free, to users of Redphone and TextSecure, Android apps supported by Open Whisper Systems that encrypt calling and text messages, respectively.

Previously, this kind of cross-platform secure messaging cost money in the form of a monthly subscription fee, and both the sender and the receiver of the message had to pay. (Or, encrypting messages cost considerable time and effort to implement without a dedicated app.) Signal and its Android counterpart TextSecure are unique in that they use forward encryption, which generates temporary keys for each message while still allowing asynchronous messaging through the use of push notifications and "prekeys." Ars reported on the implementation details in 2013.

Open Whisper Systems has pulled ahead of other privacy apps by making its interface easy for a person who doesn't know too much about encryption to use. It's also open source, so it can be vetted by experts, and its open encryption protocol can be adopted by other messaging apps. In fact last November, messaging platform Whatsapp deployed Open Whisper Systems' protocol for its 500 million Android users. Still, until now communicating with iOS users from an Android phone has been much more challenging.

BARCELONA, Spain—We gave Microsoft's two new mid-range phones, the Lumia 640 and Lumia 640 XL, a quick spin at MWC. And wouldn't you know it: they're both rather pleasant.

As low-to-mid-range handsets, the specs of the devices aren't going to blow anyone away. Rather, they address most of the concerns that the Lumia 630/635 presented: they include a full 1GB of memory, front-facing cameras, and ambient light sensors. Their screens are also bigger and better; both are 720p, 5-inch on the 640, and 5.7-inch on the XL.

Both feel customarily solid. The brightly colored backs peel off, so the device can show a slight amount of flexing if you press them just so. For the most part however, the new phones feel every bit as solid as the higher-end models. The 640 has the rounded edge and smooth curves of many other Lumias, and it's comfortable to hold.

In what appears to be the nation's first, the Seattle Police Department is launching the SPD BodyWornVideo channel. At its core, the channel is confirmation that the surveillance society has gone mainstream—perhaps too mainstream.

The channel is already controversial because of its redaction tactics, and it comes as a presidential task force about the nation's policing recommended that police wear body cameras, especially in the wake of this summer's shooting of an unarmed teen in Ferguson, Missouri. The cameras, which about a dozen Seattle officers began using late last year, can both vindicate and hold officers responsible.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) will soon have the ability to track stolen or wanted cars even if they are well outside of the five boroughs.

The NYPD is set to sign a $442,500 deal over three years with Vigilant Solutions to subscribe to the company’s massive private automated license plate reader (ALPR or LPR) database, according to a recent contract awards hearing. The database reportedly contains 2.2 billion records.

Neither the NYPD nor Vigilant Solutions immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment. The company already makes its database available to other law enforcement agencies across the country, but the NYPD is likely the largest local client agency.

Photos is a Mac analog for the iOS app of the same name, and it's meant to replace iPhoto as the basic built-in photo app to serve most users' needs. It will also be replacing Aperture, which Apple will stop offering when the final version of Photos is released. Power users will find that it lacks many advanced features, so current Aperture users should begin evaluating alternative software like Adobe Lightroom if they want software that will continue to be supported.

You should always take precautions before you install beta software, and that's doubly true here since you're updating your OS and importing your existing iPhoto libraries into a brand-new program. Make sure you have recent backups of your OS and of your photo libraries in case something goes wrong.

Uber is trying to force GitHub to disclose the IP address of every person that accessed a webpage connected to a database intrusion that exposed sensitive personal data for 50,000 drivers. The court action revealed that a security key unlocking the database was stored on a publicly accessible place, the online equivalent of stashing a house key under a doormat.

"The contents of these internal database files are closely guarded by Uber," the complaint stated. "Accessing them from Uber’s protected computers requires a unique security key that is not intended to be available to anyone other than certain Uber employees, and no one outside of Uber is authorized to access the files. On or around May 12, 2014, from an IP address not associated with an Uber employee and otherwise unknown to Uber, John Doe I used the unique security key to download Uber database files containing confidential and proprietary information from Uber’s protected computers."

]]>http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/in-major-goof-uber-stored-sensitive-database-key-on-public-github-page/feed/0Cigarettes: A product that kills two out of three of its usershttp://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/cigarettes-a-product-that-kills-two-out-of-three-of-its-users/
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/cigarettes-a-product-that-kills-two-out-of-three-of-its-users/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 19:00:18 +0000https://arstechnica.com/?p=621691that bad.]]>

“Smoking Kills” is more than just a catchy PSA or smoking cessation campaign slogan—it’s verifiable fact. Since the mid-1900s, study after study has generated compelling evidence linking smoking to increased mortality rates. Arguably, the most influential of these is the 1956 publication of smoking data on the “British Doctors Study,” which presented compelling evidence that over half of smokers would eventually die due to smoking-related complications. A new study published in BMC Medicine asserts that this mortality rate may even be as high as 66 percent, meaning that two out of three smokers will eventually die from conditions associated with their smoking.

This study, put together by investigators from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University, followed 204,953 men and women over 45 years old from New South Wales, Australia. These participants were categorized into groups of smokers, past smokers, and never smokers.

The investigators found the percentage of smokers was comparable among men and women. They also found that current smokers were likely to be younger than never smokers, and they were less likely to live in urban areas. Current smokers had lower income and education when compared to never smokers, and they were less likely to hold private health insurance. Finally, current smokers were more likely to report consuming over 15 alcoholic drinks a week and were more likely to have a higher body mass index.

BARCELONA, Spain—At Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm is showing off Sense ID, a new technology that brings ultrasonic fingerprint scanning to mobile devices. The main advantage of ultrasonic fingerprint scanning is that because it uses sound waves, it doesn't require direct contact with your finger. This means the ultrasonic sensor can be underneath the device's front cover glass or potentially underneath the display itself.

While digital fingerprint sensors have been around for years, they were popularized in the mobile space by the iPhone 5S with Touch ID. The Touch ID sensor, along with the various other fingerprint sensors that have appeared in smartphones over the last couple of years, are all based on capacitive technology. Capacitive sensors work in much the same way as a touchscreen. When you place your finger on the reader, the pattern of ridges, whorls, and minutiae points create electrical circuits that can be read and recorded. This method works just fine, but it has limitations. Your finger needs to be in direct contact with the sensor, and if you have contaminants (water, lotion, dirt) on your finger, it may not work.

Qualcomm

Because ultrasonic fingerprint recognition uses high-frequency sound waves, it can penetrate through a variety of obstacles: the aforementioned contaminants, glass, metal, plastic, and more. In theory, ultrasonic scanners can also penetrate a lot deeper into your finger's dermal layers than capacitive, which means it's possible to extract more biometric data. The ultrasonic waves are produced by a piezoelectric transducer, much like ultrasonic medical imaging devices. (Qualcomm isn't releasing much in the way of technical details right now, so we don't know exactly how deep Sense ID will be able to penetrate. You probably won't be using it to scan any internal organs... not yet, anyway.)

Supporters of the Islamic State have posted threats against Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, superimposing a crosshairs on his face. The Arabic-language statement (Google Translate) was posted on JustPaste.it (a Pastebin-style site) on Sunday. It expresses frustration over Twitter’s frequent closure of jihadi accounts.

“Our security team is investigating the veracity of these threats with relevant law enforcement officials,” Jim Prosser, a Twitter spokesman, told Ars in an e-mailed statement Monday morning, declining to answer further questions. “We don't have any other details to offer at this time.”

According to BuzzFeed, which first reported the story on Sunday, the post reads: “Your virtual war on us will cause a real war on you." According to the company’s terms of service, users are not allowed to make “direct, specific threats of violence against others,” and many Islamic State supporters have apparently run afoul of this rule.

On Monday, Epic Games announced that its Unreal Engine 4 solution for game and graphic creation, which had previously launched with a $19 per month subscription fee, would be free to download and use. Now, if you want to dabble in game creation with Epic's engine, you no longer need to pony up for a solo subscription, latch onto a company's subscription plan, or even fake that you're a student.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney confirmed the details in a blog post in which he said that anyone can now freely access the engine's entire toolset—along with the Unreal Engine Marketplace, which allows users to buy and sell custom-made art and programming assets. "This is the complete technology we use at Epic when building our own games," Sweeney added. He confirmed that current subscribers will receive a pro-rated refund effective immediately and that anyone who has ever paid for the engine will receive a $30 credit at the Unreal Engine Marketplace. Yes, that's $30 for everyone, regardless of how many hundreds of dollars you may have pumped into subscription fees already.

What hasn't changed is the other, potentially more expensive aspect of building a game in Unreal—namely, that the creators of a finished UE4 game owe Epic five percent of a game's revenue after the first $3,000 they make each quarter. Those fees were in effect while Epic was also insisting on a monthly subscription fee that added up to $240 a year. For comparison, the industry's current leader in cross-platform development tools, Unity Pro, costs game makers $75 per month to use, but it has no follow-up payment requirements. (The lesser toolset, simply named Unity, is free to use with no strings attached.)

Last year, Google made headlines when it revealed that its next version of Android would require full-disk encryption on all new phones. Older versions of Android had supported optional disk encryption, but Android 5.0 Lollipop would make it a standard feature.

But we're starting to see new Lollipop phones from Google's partners, and they aren't encrypted by default, contradicting Google's previous statements. At some point between the original announcement in September of 2014 and the publication of the Android 5.0 hardware requirements in January of 2015, Google apparently decided to relax the requirement, pushing it off to some future version of Android. Here's the timeline of events.

Loud announcement, quiet backtracking

Google's decision to encrypt new Lollipop devices by default was reported widely, in both tech-focused and mainstream publications.

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand the conviction of a rapist whose prosecution rested on DNA swiped from the armrests of an interrogation-room chair.

Without comment, the justices refused to review a 4-3 decision from Maryland's top court that upheld the life sentence and conviction of Glenn Raynor. The dissent on the Maryland Court of Appeals said a probable-cause warrant was needed and painted a grim picture of the future:

The Majority’s approval of such police procedure means, in essence, that a person desiring to keep her DNA profile private, must conduct her public affairs in a hermetically sealed hazmat suit.... The Majority's holding means that a person can no longer vote, participate in a jury, or obtain a driver's license, without opening up his genetic material for state collection and codification.

In urging the high court to review the case, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote that "allowing police the limitless ability to collect and search genetic material will usher in a future where DNA may be collected from any person at any time, entered into and checked against DNA databases, and used to conduct pervasive surveillance."

Our Android expert Ron Amadeo is currently in sunny Barcelona for this year’s Mobile World Congress, and one of the biggest things coming out of the show so far has been the announcement of Samsung’s Galaxy S6. Ron had a lot of positive things to say about the S6’s all-glass design, saying that the new device "actually feels like it's worth the price tag."

But the new Galaxy flagship is missing a pair of features that have in the past proved pretty popular with Android’s more technical users: the S6 has no removable battery and no MicroSD card slot.

Depending on how you use your smartphone, these changes might not register with you at all—in fact, considering that a certain fruit-related smartphone manufacturer has never included them in its devices and yet commands significant market share, it's clear that a removable battery and a MicroSD card slot aren’t features demanded by a majority of buyers. On the other hand, while cheap Android handsets rule the low-end purely for reasons of price, high-quality Android handsets tend to be sought out by those with a more technical bent who want more features out of their devices. And it’s that set of users that appears to be most let down by Samsung’s change.

Google Senior VP Sundar Pichai today discussed a possible wireless service that Google could launch in the next few months.

"We don't intend to be a carrier at scale, and we're working with existing partners," Pichai said in a public Q&A session at Mobile World Congress, according to The Verge. "You'll see some of our ideas come to fruit in the next few months." Pichai oversees Android, Chrome, and Google Apps.

The Information reported last month that Google plans to become an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator), reselling Sprint and T-Mobile network capacity to consumers rather than building out its own cell towers. "Google is preparing to sell mobile phone plans directly to customers and manage their calls and mobile data over a cellular network, according to three people with knowledge of the plans," the site reported at the time.

BARCELONA, Spain—At Mobile World Congress 2015, Intel has unveiled its latest in a very long line of attempts at securing a beachhead in the mobile market: the Atom x3, Atom x5, and Atom x7 SoCs.

As the naming implies, the Atom x3 is a low-end part that is probably destined for developing markets in countries such as India and China. The Atom x5 and x7, however, are quad-core 14nm Cherry Trail chips with Broadwell-class Intel HD graphics. Performance-wise, the x5 and x7 chips should be pretty good—but right now we only have Intel's own benchmarks to go on. There's also no word from Intel on the power consumption of the new chips, which is rarely a good sign when you're trying to break into a highly competitive, entrenched market.

Let's start at the bottom. Atom x3 is essentially rebranded SoFIA, but now along with a 3G version there is a new chip (the x3-C3440) with an integrated LTE modem. Rather unusual despite its use of the Atom brand name, the x3 is a 28nm chip that isn't being built at Intel's own fabs. Instead, Intel is using TSMC as a foundry, primarily because it isn't cost effective for Intel to build chips with integrated modems on its own bleeding-edge 14nm node. The top-end Atom x3, the x3-C3440, has a quad-core CPU and Mali 720 MP2 GPU (yes, that's a GPU designed by ARM Holdings). We probably won't see the Atom x3 in Western markets; it will be cheaply fabricated in Asia, and it will be used in very cheap phones and tablets. We have asked Intel what CPU core is being used by Atom x3, but the company hasn't yet responded.

BARCELONA, Spain—Qualcomm, after an agonizingly long wait, has finally revealed a few details about its next-gen, top-end CPU core. Called Kryo, the 64-bit CPU core will debut in the Snapdragon 820 SoC, which will begin sampling "on a leading edge FinFET process" in the second half of 2015. It should be in consumer devices by this time next year.

Those are all the definite details that we have from Qualcomm, but we can infer a few more. "Leading edge" FinFET in this case will refer to either 16nm at TSMC or 14nm at Samsung/Global Foundries. Kryo will be a 64-bit ARM chip, which means it will be compatible with the ARMv8 instruction set, but beyond that we would expect to see a brand new microarchitecture that is better suited to a wider range of usage scenarios than Krait. It's fairly safe to assume that Qualcomm will once again target performance-per-watt for both Kryo and the dozens of other hardware blocks that eventually make up Snapdragon 820.

The Snapdragon 820 SoC will play a key role in a new cognitive computing platform that Qualcomm is calling Zeroth. Cognitive computing is a fairly nebulous and nascent idea that refers to computers that can cleverly adapt to ambiguous, uncertain, human problems. In the case of the Zeroth platform, Qualcomm has developed a software suite that leverages underlying hardware blocks (the modem, the image signal processor, the audio codec, etc.) to provide some clever functionality. Intuitive Security, for example, uses behavioral analysis to provide more secure authentication and protect against malware threats. Another feature uses various environmental conditions to trigger contextual actions (yes, this requires the microphone and other sensors to be always-on). Apparently, Zeroth will even be able to "personalize and adapt interactions by recognizing [facial] expressions."

More troubled times for Google+. Just under a year ago, the social network had a major shakeup where Vic Gundotra, the then-head of Google+, left Google. Dave Besbris took over and has been running the social network for about 11 months, but now he's out, too. The new new head of Google+ is Bradley Horowitz, who was promoted from VP of product.

In eleven months under Besbris, Google+ appears to have accomplished almost nothing. The biggest—and pretty much only—feature that launched during that time was voting polls. According to a report from TechCrunch, morale at Google+ has been pretty low since Gundotra left, and over half the original staff has left to take on other projects at Google (which many Google employees are free to do). The blame for this doesn't necessarily all fall on Besbris, but the report mentions that employees weren't given many incentives to stay.

Comments from a few high-ranking Googlers seem to indicate that, as the original reports said, Google+ will be split up into several products. It seems that Photos and Hangouts will be split out from G+ somehow, and the social part is now casually referred to as "the stream." For instance, here's Horowitz's statement on his promotion: "Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true -- I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products!" And Sundar Pichai, SVP of Android, Chrome, and Google Apps, told Forbes "I think increasingly you’ll see us focus on communications, photos, and the Google+ Stream as three important areas, rather than being thought of as one area."